1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to document printers and, more specifically, to document printers that can receive, process, and transform multimedia data, and output it in a different format.
2. Background of the Invention
Cost and quality improvements in multimedia technologies have led to a proliferation of monitoring devices and their applications. High-quality video cameras and microphones are becoming commonplace in the home and workplace, and have proven to be useful for diverse purposes ranging from teleconferencing to surveillance to work flow management. Multimedia data captured by such monitoring devices are typically delivered in an unprocessed form to a medium such as a digital tape, hard disk, or memory card. Typically, the user must then filter the data in order to isolate the useful elements—for instance, by editing out unwanted noise. Often the data will have to be further processed to create a usable record, for instance by isolating relevant events. The process of sifting through such data is often tedious and error-prone, requiring users to play, fast-forward, and rewind through voluminous stores of data. In the case of surveillance applications, in which the primary purpose of such applications is essentially to wait for certain events to occur, the time and resources spent carrying out the repeated steps of event detection can be considerable.
The processing of multimedia data to create a usable record typically involves several disparate steps, each potentially requiring considerable effort. Oftentimes a user will have to convert and transfer multimedia data in different stages to different devices—for instance from an analog tape to an unprocessed digital file, then into a summary file containing excerpts of the data, then to a memory or output device. While the processing of a multimedia files commonly involves the same repeated tasks—for instance, making an multimedia recording of a meeting, filtering out the noise, adding participant and other identifier information, and then sending the processed multimedia record to the meeting attendants—there is no easy way to automate them. In addition, because the data are typically not printed to a paper document, they are difficult to incorporate into the existing paper-based workflow by which most offices function. Although means do exist to map multimedia data to paper friendly outputs—for instance, to transcribe intelligible multimedia records to a dialog script or to extract images or frames from a video record—which then could be printed, these additional conversion steps are often not automated or performed.
Thus, there is a need for an integrated system that can receive multimedia data, process it, and deliver an output to a printed document or other media.